A gardening system is a system used to practice growing and cultivating plants as a part of horticulture. A gardening system is usually developed and implemented as a manual operation. An automated gardening system is designed to enable us to manage gardening, including monitoring moisture, temperature, and humidity.
In general, we can build a smart gardening system based on the high-level architecture that is shown in the following figure:
The following is a list of components to build a smart gardening system:
- Sensors: Corresponding to your case, you need sensor devices to measure the garden's environment and condition. Capturing physical objects to digital form enables us to perform computing and processing.
- MCU board with network module: The goal of MCU is to process all data that is acquired from sensors. Most MCU boards have limited computation, so we need to send sensor data to a server for further computation. To enable us to send data, the MCU board should be attached to a network module, either Ethernet or wireless.
- Gateway: This is optional since some MCU boards can communicate with a server directly without modifying the protocol format. If a network module has the capability to deliver data over a primitive protocol, the functioning of gateway is necessary because a gateway can translate one protocol format to another protocol format.
- Server: This is a center computation. Most servers have high-end hardware so heavy computation can be addressed.
This architecture is an ideal condition. In a real project, you may integrate an MCU board and server in one box. For instance, you can use a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBoard. These are a mini computers that you can deploy libraries to with respect to your case.
